A Silent Elegy in Motion

Have a look at this collective headstone for “the 1,337 journalists killed in the line of duty since 1992.”Watch their names coalesce on screen into the image you see below. It is a silent elegy in motion that makes it pure poetry.

Comments

It is terrible to see so many journalists killed. Part of the problem is that journalists are increasingly used for propaganda, such as the US practice of embedding them. Marine Lt. Col. Rick Long put it this way, “Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.”

When journalists become a mechanism of “information warfare,” it is only natural that militaries view them as legitimate and even prized targets. And that isn’t just a practice of our enemies. The US military specifically targets journalists too – possibly more than any other combatant nation.

I think the journalistic community must accept part of the blame for allowing themselves to be used this way. They are put in greater danger, and we can’t trust news provided by journalists acting as flacks, or as “imbeds,” as they have become known.

Chelsea Manning, wrote an op-ed for the NYT about this problem. She noted that the number of US journalists allowed in Iraq was inordinately limited. And that vetting of reporters by the military was used “to screen out those judged likely to produce critical coverage,” and that once embedded, journalists knew they couldn’t write anything that would get them flagged. Any journalists the military didn’t like, were forcibly removed. Manning concluded that as a result, “the American public’s access to the facts is gutted, which leaves them with no way to evaluate the conduct of American officials

As part of this “information war,” the US military also conducts a constant cultural war on its own people. We are continually bombarded with media glorifying the military and American militarism. This has created such a worshipful attitude toward the military that it has become harmful to democracy. Excessive worship of the military and militarism, and the military control of information, is one of the most notable precursors of fascism.

Your last sentence really struck me. I hadn’t heard that quote before. Apparently the exact wording is: “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall McLuhan (1970), Culture is Our Business, p. 66.

How incredibly perspicacious. It baffles me that people do not recognize how visionary McLuhan’s theories and predictions were. How could someone back in the 60s understand so much about the world today that most of us are still figuring out?